Archives for category: Communication
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The Late Post

April 1, 2016 //
2

I was at a commemoration the other day, to mark the centenary of an important event in Ireland’s history. As part of the ceremony they sounded a baleful and well known song called The Last Post.

Ironically, it reminded me that that very same day I’d forgotten to publish my morning’s blog post. From The Last Post to The Late Post, as it were.

My posts go out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I’ve probably forgotten to post 3 times in 400-some posts. I’m usually a few weeks ahead on posts, but the combination of two weeks travelling pushed me out of my routine and all of a sudden I was one blog deficient.

A chap I used to follow a lot is Seth Godin – less so now because I spend quite a bit of my own free time writing. The eponymous Seth’s blog probably has in excess of 6,000 posts under its belt – or should I say roll? – at this stage. I’m sure he hasn’t ever missed one. He’s probably a lot of weeks ahead compared to my few, and either he has help to do the scheduling so that he never runs out or forgets to hit publish, or he is a superbly infallible machine that never misses. I suspect it’s the latter, since when I used to catch every single post I would on very rare occasions find a small typo that I would make him aware of. He never failed to come back within a couple hours to acknowledge my email and the fix.

Either way, I suppose it’s better that occasionally it’s my late post, rather than my last post…

 

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Categories Communication

The Destruction Manual

March 30, 2016 //
0

A funny thing happened the other day. A guy I know – I play soccer with him a couple times a month and would know him as an acquaintance rather than a friend – came to service our gas central heating system.

In he breezed, and asked me if I had the ‘destruction’ manual for the boiler. He probably gets to say it numerous times a week to break the ice with the customer and it made me smile as I handed over the instruction manual – to use its more common moniker.

Within 5 minutes the system had switched on of its own accord without the controller computer telling it to – not good – and ten minutes later the fuse blew on the system and shorted the circuit for the utility room.

He had indeed used the destruction manual to destroy the central heating.

It got me thinking about something I learned about early on in my managerial career, namely the self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s the notion that your attitude towards an impending situation can often govern how it turns out. If you think a meeting’s going to go badly, it probably will. If you go in with a positive mindset, you tend to get a positive outcome. Clearly there’s some cause and effect at work here.

It follows, therefore, that a positive disposition is always worth the effort, as it will help the end result favour you and also perhaps rub off on others as well.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language

The Collective Intake of Breath

March 28, 2016 //
6

We’ve all witnessed those moments when someone does something truly remarkable.

What emerges in the immediate aftermath of one of those moments is what I call the Collective Intake of Breath.

They’re easier to spot in the world of entertainment I think. In soccer, there is a moment like the Cruyff turn, showcased in the 1974 World Cup. For a brief instant, the entire audience is captivated and taken aback by the sheer artistry. It simultaneously draws breath as if it were one giant multi-headed beast.

Two of these personal moments come to me first, though they occur – thankfully – regularly enough in a lifetime to keep us interested. One was seeing Michael Jackson in concert, in front of an estimated audience of 130,000, do his moonwalk thing – but sideways. I kid you not. It was mesmerising, and for a split second, you could hear nothing.

Another was a decade before when I was at the world table tennis championships, watching a match between an attacking Japanese player and a defensive Chinese player. The defensive player was pinned to the back of the court when another Japanese salvo flashed to his extreme left. In an instant, needing the extra distance to reach across his body to play the right-handed backhand, he turned his back on the table and ball, and flicked his outstretched wrist in a slicing motion. The ball flew off his racket, a centimetre over the net and he was back in the rally. It was probably the finest shot I’d ever seen, and I would have seen a million shots at that point. Same collective intake of breath.

So when we’re producing work, perhaps we should aim for something so remarkable that we cause in our audience a collective intake of breath? Not by offending or shocking them, but by amazing and astonishing them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Mea Culpa – Not

March 23, 2016 //
0

Do you know what I find pretty shocking these days? When a company doesn’t admit they were wrong, or they made a mistake, or their service failed to live up to expectations.

Now there’s a small chance a company didn’t know that its website was down for a good while, for example, but it’s a very small chance these days. When was the last time you saw a company admit they messed up, unless they were forced to because a PR issue they could have stemmed early has spiralled into a nightmare?

I recently got an email from a company whose stuff I subscribe to, because it’s very good content. The email came thru with the subject line exactly like this: [insert subversive subject line]. I kid you not. It’s wrong on so many levels, even when you try and explain it away as deliberate, but I never saw a subsequent apology.

Companies seem to want to sweep it under the corporate carpet, forget it ever happened, or else hope that no-one noticed. They hardly ever say ‘mea culpa’ unless they have to. Wouldn’t it be the most refreshing thing in the world if you went onto a website and there was a prominent statement to the effect of:

“Do you know something, our website was down for 2 hours last Thursday, and that might have been when you were browsing it. If that’s the case, we humbly apologise for your experience not being up the standards we set ourselves. We’ll try our best not to let it happen again.”

Do you think it will send their customers’ lawyers scurrying off to see if they can eek out a few bucks for a broken SLA? Do you think it’ll send their stock price plummeting and plunge the world’s markets into disarray? Probably not. A little bit of honesty, humility and integrity will in all likelihood have the opposite effect.

This is what it boils down to. It shouldn’t be a case of ‘Phew, got away with that one, let’s chalk it up to good fortune’ but rather ‘We should do better, we should come clean and we should redouble our efforts to live up to our brand promise.’

It’s OK to say ‘I’m sorry, my fault.’  In fact I encourage it, especially if you manage people.

The trouble is, it’s almost always expediency over effort.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Karma

March 16, 2016 //
0

I’m not a religious person, so I don’t really hold much with divine direction.

I do believe in karma, however, the kind where spiritual credits and debits are in operation. Over the course of a life, these pretty much even out I think. If you do good, life pays you back with good. If you do bad, at the expense of others, then a big piece of bad will probably even the score.

I was reminded of this the other day when my good lady and I were at a fun-raising pub quiz night. As it turned out, our team won the quiz, and we were presented with a very bag of generous goodies each, including money. We gave half the money back as a prize for the raffle. We then promptly won 2 prizes in the raffle. Score one for the nice guys.

There was a table next to us, with a coupe of older folk and their kids. They didn’t win anything in the raffle, despite having bought quite a few tickets for quite a few prizes. We gave them one of our goodie bags and were preparing to head off.

Then, over the loud speakers our hostess explained that she had forgotten one of the really good prizes, and so there was to be one more draw, for a new smartphone. ‘Ooh,’ said Mrs D, ‘I need a new smartphone.’

You can guess the rest. Score two for the nice guys.

Karma, paying it forward, call it what you will. Be nice, it works.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Customer Requirements

March 7, 2016 //
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It’s hard to underestimate the importance of understanding your customer’s requirements.

I only needed one lesson to remember this. In my final year of college I paid a few quid to go on a 2-day ‘introduction to business’ course. It was a very academic college, with almost no course devoted to business, so this was something entirely new for many of us. It was very interactive, by which I mean we were divided into groups and completed tasks like launching a new product, negotiating the construction of a building with a local council, or selling something to customers. I remember it from thirty years ago because we learned by doing. If I’d been lectured at, the course would have melted into the hundreds of other days of ‘training’ that I’ve received.

The course was designed to simulate working in real business, not learning the theoretical stuff you do as a undergraduate or graduate. As such, the exercises had to be completed within a certain time. As you’re probably sick of hearing from me, time is the one thing we never have enough of in business, so the exercises had a genuine applicability.

In one exercise our job was to ‘manufacture’ products and sell them to ‘customers’. The product was the paper that fits into 4-hole punch binders, European A4 size. Our team was running behind on time and after a poor sales experience with our first group of customers, we were in a mad dash to get in front of our next group of customers.

This time we were ready, we had our paper, freshly punched, and proudly demonstrated this to our latest group of customers. They became really agitated and threatened to leave the meeting. We didn’t know what the problem was, so we asked them. So they took out their binders. The binders were A5, 2-hole punch.

We hadn’t understood the rules of the game, and we hadn’t listened to our customers to understand their requirements, which were different to the other groups of customers in the game.

Didn’t make that mistake again…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

What’s Your Filter?

March 4, 2016 //
2

What’s your filter when you’re writing, for business or pleasure? As with many things, physical or digital, I find it often helps to put something through a filter to clean it and make it suitable for consumption.

I create a lot of content in the area of business software. Some of it is quite technical and some of the concepts are quite complex. I’m not technical and I sometimes find it hard to fathom technical stuff. I do complex well either, and I always strive for simple if I can. If you haven’t explained software in business terms for a business audience, you haven’t explained it properly.

So the filter I use is me. First of all I have to be sure that I can understand something. Someone has to be able to explain something new to me in a way that helps me understand it, without hiding behind jargons, TLAs or short cuts. If I don’t understand it, I ask a question to get an explanation I understand. If I understand it, then that’s half the battle.

Once I understand, I try to write it in a way that I would understand. I know that sounds silly when you read it that way. Sometimes, however, we can write about something without fully understanding what we’re writing. So I ask myself, ‘could I understand this if I was reading about it as a novice in this area?’

If it’s not understandable to me, I try and re-write it until it is. Of course, I’ll make mistakes and accurately convey a misunderstanding or else inaccurately describe something I understood correctly. But that’s why we do drafts, so we can get feedback and improve them.

My golden rule: if it’s understandable to me, it’s understandable to anyone.

 

 

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

The Eighth B2B Product Launch Process Step

February 29, 2016 //
0

In the seventh B2B product launch process step, we reviewed the outcomes of our efforts and hopefully learned some lessons to help us improve the next time.

So what’s the eighth B2B product launch process step? It’s the same as the last step of the B2B marketing process, the B2B buying process, and the B2B sales process. It’s back to the beginning, to the first step.

The cycle of the B2B product launch process is complete. As at the very beginning, we need to check our facts. We’re onto a new project, a new product launch, step one of a new launch process. Off we go – again!

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Seventh B2B Product Launch Process Step

February 26, 2016 //
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Well, we executed the plan. We completed the sixth step of the B2B product launch process.

Now it’s time to see how we did. The seventh B2B product launch process step is to manage the outcomes of the project.

It’s important to manage the outcomes and compare them with the requirements and targets we set earlier in the process. One of the common mistakes is to move onto the next shiny toy and not review performance, so that you learn from your mistakes, celebrate the high points and be better the next time.

In managing those outcomes, it’s important to be fluid. In some areas you’ll have satisfied your requirements, and in some areas you won’t. If you nailed every target, then you probably weren’t ambitious enough.

A fluid approach helps you understand the poorer areas of performance. Did you fail to accurately capture your customer’s needs, or did you interpret their feedback wrongly? Which areas of the business did not deliver to target? What are the lessons learned?

A ‘lessons learned’ meeting, which should be a collaborative rather than a finger-pointing or scapegoat-finding exercise, is a great way to close out the project and feed the lessons – requirements, scheduling, resourcing, delivery – into the next project and across the business.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Sixth B2B Product Launch Process

February 24, 2016 //
0

In our fifth B2B product launch process step, we made sure our people were ready to go.

In our sixth B2B product launch process step, we go. It’s time to execute the plan.

Of course, no plan ever goes absolutely 100% to plan, if you pardon the repetition. That’s why it’s always good to have a plan B, and perhaps a plan C. For the main pillars of your plan, what will do you if one of those pillars doesn’t stand up as you expect? For example, if you’ve decided for a ‘big bang’ launch, a good fall-back position is to go for a phased or soft launch, starting with a smaller, more manageable set of advocate customers, and moving from there.

During the execution phase, which might take place over weeks or even months, regular progress meetings with all the key players keep the project on track and allow you to take corrective action if key pillars fall behind, affecting the overall RAG – Red, Amber or Green – status of the project.

You’ve done much of the hard work, well done. In many ways, this sixth step is the easiest. It’s like when it comes to game-time. Everyone knows what’s expected of them, and what the steps are to deliver.

And now, for the next step, it’s time to see how you got on.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
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